


The Beginning

by Fierceawakening



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 11:13:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4664472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fierceawakening/pseuds/Fierceawakening
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was pondering some of TFP's... interesting writing choices. Particularly Buffimus Prime, who I always felt seemed cheap. I decided fic needed to exist where he Came Back Wrong. Not only to mitigate the ridiculousness of making Optimus unstoppable, but also because I have way too much fun making Optimus tragic. </p>
<p>So I wrote it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beginning

“Optimus Prime.”

The words were a snarl of rage. The mech who spoke them crouched in a fighter’s stance. Curved barbs at his shoulders bristled and a long blade extended from one of his wrists. On top of that arm, a massive cannon glowed with stored energy, a bright pit of lavender fire aimed directly at Optimus.

And in his free hand he held a massive sword, its blade black, its jagged edges glowing with a purple, eldritch light.

_Of course._

Optimus cycled a sigh through his vents and stepped forward. The bulk of his legs felt heavy and wrong, a burden he still hadn’t quite learned to carry.

And tucked away beneath the thick armor of his chest, the Matrix hummed with energy of its own.

Once, his spark had pulsed in harmony with it. Now –

“Megatron,” he said, and opened his arms wide in a gesture of surrender.

Red optics flared bright in the warrior’s scarred sockets. His mouth twisted into a grimace of rage.

And, perhaps, of fear.

He couldn’t begrudge Megatron that. The body the Matrix had given him – he felt only its weight. But he knew he towered over all the others, now.

“I am not here to fight you, old friend,” he said, and lowered his great head.

“No?” Megatron’s voice was acid, spat like corrupted energon from a wound. “Not here to destroy me? Not here to shatter my body again, to toss me into my warship’s core and watch it and me go down together?”

A wry smile curled Optimus’s lip plates. “You’d never let me, old friend.”

Megatron’s optics flickered. He smirked, a scarred mirror of Optimus’s own expression. “No. I wouldn’t.”

He stepped forward, still wary, his cannon still trained on his apparent enemy, his sword held tight in his clawed hand.

“The Matrix gave you power,” he said. “Gave you strength. Gave you weapons.” His gaze inched up to Optimus’s shoulders.

“Gave you wings,” he snarled.

In Optimus’s chest, the Matrix pulsed. The alien presence shivered through him and he winced. Static crackled in his vision.

He could not see, not clearly, but even the static couldn’t blur the flash of the blade sweeping down. He shuttered his useless optics and braced himself for the pain.

None came, only a cold, eerie chill where the cursed sword had passed by his chest plate, not touching it. He opened his optics.

Megatron was staring at him, red optics wide. But Megatron wasn’t surprised for long. His optics narrowed, a glitter of ruby. “You didn’t move.”

“My vision –”

“You know I am here. You know how I move, old friend.” Another cold laugh. “Blind or no, you could easily have stepped out of the way. Why didn’t you?”

“I am – not supposed to be here,” Optimus said.

“Not supposed – ?”

But the confusion had left Megatron’s face. His gaze was fixed on Optimus’s chest, the impossibly thick armor, the form broader than Megatron’s own –

The thing hidden inside it.

“It was not supposed to bring me back,” Optimus said.

“The Matrix –” Megatron began. “It gave you this body –”

“I should have died, Megatron.”

Megatron chuckled, sharp and bitter. “Yes. You should have.” Lightning curled over the surface of his cannon, and it hummed again, deep and low and hungry. “I killed you.”

Optimus ignored him. “I should have become one with the Matrix. Should have joined those who came before me, all of the long lineage of Primes who have lived and died since our race began. But instead –”

Megatron leaned closer. His frame still bristled with spikes and weapons, but for the moment it seemed he’d forgotten them. “Instead?”

“Instead it gave me this.” Optimus looked down at himself. “I – I was dying. There was – there was a great light.”

His engines hummed with the memory. He felt the Matrix inside him again, warm and alive, and for the first time since his resurrection it felt warm and lulling.

“I – Alpha Trion spoke to me. He told me – he told me that it was my time. That I had done all I could –”

Megatron’s rasping laugh drew him from his reverie. “Against me.”

Optimus sighed. “Yes.”

Megatron laughed again, and for the first time, the sound was rich and resonant. “Then all those millions of years of war –  _against me_  –”

“Yes.” Optimus spared him another wry grin. “We lost, Megatron. Or at least I did.”

“Then this – this frame, this new body – this  _thing_  that threw me into Darkmount’s power core like my frame was a pile of lifeless scrap –”

“You were right, old friend.” Optimus’s frame hummed. The Matrix pulsed in his chest again. “It – this wasn’t natural. Wasn’t right. I – I was leaving, my spark merging with the light –”

“And you came back.”

“The others – they needed me. They knew that – with me gone –”

Megatron’s voice was as sharp as a blade. “Cybertron and Earth alike would be mine.”

“Yes.”

“Because I had already won.”

Optimus winced. “You had. But – the Autobots could not accept it. The humans could not accept it.”

“You couldn’t accept it.”

“I – I do not know.” Optimus shook his head. Too large, too heavy. “I only know they brought me back.”

Megatron stared. A bright hunger lit his optics. They glowed molten-metal red, Optimus shuddered, thinking of fire, of death, of charred and lifeless metal.

Megatron had told Optimus once that the two of them were titans, clashing in rage and might on battlefields across the galaxy.

If he gave himself over now, Earth and Cybertron alike would fall to a titan of war.

“You were right, old friend,” he said again, his words slow and deliberate. “I did not earn this body. You earned yours. In the Pits where you fought in Kaon. In the fights for your revolution.” He shuttered his optics. “In your battles against me.”

Megatron’s voice was a low rasp. “Then you –”

Optimus’s frame rumbled. “I must join the Matrix. This frame is not mine to bear. I do not belong here any more.”

“And then?”

Optimus let his optics iris open. “Then the Matrix is yours, old friend. If you want it, as you once did.”

Megatron’s optics widened. The claw beneath his knife-wrist curled. “You know me too well by now, old friend. You know what I will do if you give this to me.”

“I do.”

“You know this changes nothing. That I will not – take it and become like you. That my people crave war, and conquest, and destruction.” His optics flickered again. “And so do I.”

Optimus lowered his head. “I know. I – I do not imagine what you will do. I cannot allow myself to think of it. I ask only one thing.”

Megatron shook his head. “Of course you would, even now. But I would not have respected you otherwise – as a friend or as an enemy. What is it you want, now that you cannot ask for anything?”

“I do not ask you to change. I –” Optimus shook his head in his turn. “I know better than that, now. I do not even ask you to accept the Matrix. For all I know you would shun it anyway, because it was mine. But if you do accept it – if you do take it into yourself, as I did long ago, and learn from the wisdom of the Primes –”

“Get to the point,” Megatron said, but there was warmth in the contempt of his voice.

“Only that you consult with it someday. That – once in a while – you listen to me.”

Megatron's optics widened. He said nothing.

“If not for the sake of those I want to protect --" Optimus stopped, his voice crackling into static. He cleared his vocalized and tried again. "Then -- for the sake of the friendship we had once, long ago.”

Megatron laughed again, a low, soft sound.

He lifted his head and stared at Optimus, his crimson optics bright and unreadable. Then he nodded once. "Perhaps."

Optimus smiled. The plates of metal covering his chest slid open, flooding both mechs in light.


End file.
